BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD Joseph Copp
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Plymouth’s Abercrombie vsion imposed on to the plan of the old city: by Joseph Copp
BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD Joseph Copp What can the societal pursuits of modernity; more specifically Lafayette, Detroit, Plymouth, UK and Brasilia, Brazil teach us concerning the ambition of utopias and consequent inhabitation of the everyday?
Societal Renovation This essay is situated at the point in the 20th Century whereby the societal transformation sought by modernity rested on the brink having seemingly faded from its initial reformist position. Transformative gestures of urbanism that characterised this period can be seen in a utopian light given their ambition to render a vision of a new society to that of the existing. The social utopias that came to fruition within the 1950’s offer an opportunity to examine the societal renovation when a new world is constructed upon the ruins of the old, hence modernism provides the medium for this investigation. Crucial to this is the presence of war that interjected the pursuit of modernity immediately prior to the fifties’; the intention is therefore to observe the social commentary that accompanies the birth of selected case studies, and in retrospect look to the ‘new’ relationship that has evolved between the society and the built vision. An observation of current everyday life aims to mobilise a portrait of such matters. Consequently, the text is to question what may be learnt from imposing a utopian vision by examining how and why certain aspects of these pursuits have proved successful and indeed others not. Ultimately, it is an exercise to observe the process of prescribing a new reality to a society through architecture.
Contextual Grounding Of utmost importance is the condition, out of which Mies Van der Rohe’s Lafayette development in Detroit, USA; Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Plan for Plymouth, UK; and Lucio Costa’s Plano Piloto for Brasilia, Brazil have emerged. These have come in to being through razing to the ground of a previous incumbent, devastation by war, and beginnings from a tabula rasa respectively. This dictates the primary level of the tripartite discussion. Secondly, is the notion of scale to consider that takes its lead from Karl Manheim’s proposition regarding utopia and scale. These case studies serve to investigate the home, the street and the city plan; multiplicities of scale that one might experience daily, and are therefore coherent to the discussion of the everyday.
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Comparison of scale between case studies (Satellite imagery taken from a constant altitude): by Joseph Copp
What can the societal pursuits of modernity; more specifically Lafayette, Detroit, Plymouth, UK and Brasilia, Brazil teach us concerning the ambition of utopias and consequent inhabitation of the everyday?
Prologue “Owen Hatherley sums up the modernist project as “’building… a new world on the ruins of the old.’ But asks, ‘what…if the new society never emerged?”1 This statement provides the grounding and format for a discussion based on modernism as a vehicle to test notions of utopia and the quotidian. Arguably, these are two ideologies that at first seem highly contradictory, given that “Utopia [is], now mostly associated with a desire for order spurred on by supposed rationality,”2 and that conversely as Bryony Randall states, “there can be no hierarchy [or order] of dailiness, nothing and no-one is intrinsically more everyday than another.”3 The three key concepts at play within Hatherley’s proposition implicate the new world, the ruins of the old, and both the societies that pre-existed, and that later came to emerge. These are the ideas that are to be probed in the text to follow. The modernist project, in its earliest incarnation sought to “transform the lives of ordinary people,”4 a challenge proposed by Manfredo Tafuri. Within the conception of this agenda, an emphasis became placed upon the pursuit of science as a means to justify the endeavors of the time. Rem Koolhaas recalls “modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally.”5 Philosopher Alain De Botton argues however that it remained a romantic one as a means to “support a way of life that appealed to them [, the architects.]”6 Irrespective of this subsequent judgment, urbanism as a tool for social renewal became “based on the projection of ordered spatial forms… [to] provide the setting for ordered, harmonious societies.”7 Jose Luis Sert’s 1942 Can Our Cities Survive? argued “for the implementation of the Functional City model as a blueprint for… eliminating urban blight.”8 1 Owen Hatherley cited in Malcolm Miles, Salvaging Modernism cited in (Eds.) Miles, Malcolm, Savage, Janice, Nutopia – A Critical View of Future Cities (Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press 2012) p153 2 Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge 2005) p2 3 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007) p188 4 Murray Fraser, Beyond Koolhaas cited in Rendell, J. Hill, J. Fraser, M. Dorrian, M (eds.), Critical Architecture, (Oxon: Routledge, 2007) p 338 5 Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace cited in October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence. (Spring, 2002 pp. 175-190) p175 6 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness – The Secret of Furnishing your Life (London: Penguin 2007) p63 7 David Pinder, In Defence of Utopian Urbanism: Imagining Cities after the ‘End of Utopia’ cited in Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 84 No. ¾, Special IssueL The dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia (Sweden: Wiley 2002) p233 8 Roy Kozlovsky, Urban Play, Intimate Space and Post War Subjectivity cited in Di Palma, Vittoria, Periton, Diana, Lathouri, Marina (eds.) Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Abingdon: Routledge 2009) p195 5
As a means to examine Hatherley’s ruins of the old, an observation of society prior to the implementation of any plan, engages the circumstances under which a utopia is born. The implication of utopia is in need of definition. It has become associated at its most simplest with a desire for order, most commonly thought of at an all-encompassing scale. Utopia is from its origin an exercise in obtaining perfect legal, social and political systems.9 More presently Nathaniel Coleman states “utopias propose… a basic transformation of some part of the human condition. He cites sociologist Karl Manheim’s argument “that relative utopias could be realizable whereas absolute ones are not.” 10 Manheim suggests a paradox that relative utopias are small enough that they can provide a vision for a larger utopia, and that conversely absolutist utopias are so large that they resist realization and hence can only suggest fragments of a more successful smaller utopia. 11 This will provide the format for a discussion based fundamentally on scale. Coleman states utopia is also multiple, comprising of plural utopias that individually transform some part of the human condition; the intention of this essay is to base itself around the idea of the social utopia. This is cohesive to the employment of modernism as a device for social transformation. The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modern (CIAM), founded in 1928 charged itself with the spreading of the modern movement. From CIAM in the early fifties, emerged a fragment group known as Team 10 who would unlike Jose Luis Sert, advocate children’s street play as a “regenerative social force”, a metaphor employed by Roy Kozlovsky in Urban Play to mobilise the discussion of prescribed activity and self organization in urbanism.12 The activities of Team 10 and attitudes of the time could be seen to be taking their toll on the momentum of the modern movement. “By the 1950’s, modern architecture had already been drained of much of its original optimism,” It was seen to be tamed and hence “moving away from its original (youthful) social reformist position.”13 It is at this point that the case studies for this text are situated. It is the proposed tipping point whereby the social utopianism of the era rested on the brink. Consequently, as Owen Hatherley queries, “what if the new society never emerged?” An observation of quotidian operation in its current context aims to draw an insight of what did indeed emerge; the reality is there is in each case study an emergent population. Whether a transformation has been witnessed or not is more so the root of Hatherley’s proposition. Such a topic as ‘the everyday’ tends to allocate more emphasis to the philosopher; Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau portray the everyday as “that which precisely evades systemisation.”14 Conversely, an alternative stance is taken by Martin Heidigger and Ed-
9 Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Longman 2004) 10 Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture pp24-5 11 Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture pp24-5 12 Roy Kozlovsky, Urban Play cited in Di Palma, Periton, Lathouri (eds.) Intimate Metropolis p195 13 Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture pp96-7 14 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life p11 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
mund Husserl who question, “how the everyday might be theorized as a kind of system.”15 In reality, all daily operation would seem to qualify as being of ‘the everyday’. This essay is situated more so in line with the former pair, acknowledging everyday life as the relationship of society to the utopian vision.
15 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life p11 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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Introduction The agenda of this essay is to probe the conditions upon birth of social utopias, and witness now in retrospect the makings of everyday life in the societies that have developed. An observation of modernist pursuits provides the vehicle for this discussion. Of utmost importance is the condition, out of which these exemplars have emerged; Mies Van der Rohe’s Lafayette development in Detroit, USA; Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Plan for Plymouth, UK; and Lucio Costa’s Plano Piloto for Brasilia, Brazil. These have emerged through razing to the ground of a previous incumbent, devastation by war, and beginnings from a tabula rasa respectively. This dictates the primary level of the tripartite discussion that will ensue. Secondly, is the notion of scale to consider that takes its lead from Karl Manheim’s proposition regarding utopia and scale. These case studies serve to investigate the home, the street and the city plan; multiplicities of scale that one might experience daily, and are therefore coherent to the discussion of the everyday. Subsequently, the aim is to observe the everyday as a current idea within these case studies. It is to look back upon developments of this era that have been criticised by figures such as Robert Hughes and Rem Koolhaas, and to observe the society that emerged; to look but not touch so to speak.
BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
Home: Layayette, Detroit THEN: To consider the conditions, out of which this utopian modernity arises, is to observe the social commentary that accompanies the subsequent fruition. It is important to understand the lives of the affected people of Detroit before the imposition of such a utopian vision as Lafayette; after all, this social utopia was not achieved by means of an entirely democratic process. This has a wider context within modernism in that “social regeneration was predicated on the notion that the state had the right… [to] act upon the interiority of each of its subjects.”16 Lafayette Park was realised between Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald, Mies van der Rohe and his colleagues Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell. This was (unoficially) the first case of urban renewal in the US17, the previous incumbent of the land and officially designated (vernacular) slum Black Bottom was razed to the ground in the late 1940’s. The site remained vacant until the mid 1950’s. A significant proportion of the development was completed by the early 1960’s, beyond which in such a delicate climate as Detroit, a rich cultural thread began to unravel. This has seen the deterioration of Detroit’s population from 1.8 million in the 1940’s to around 700,000 currently.18 An overtly racist agenda had already driven settled African-Americans out to make way for Lafayette. There is a suggestion that these displaced citizens, who were forced to the overcrowded city’s west side, were those responsible for the disruption that erupted there two decades later.19 Ultimately, it is evident that the project has transcended these issues, having resisted the spates of emigration, riots, and the industrial demise of Detroit. It is of interest why despite this turmoil Lafayette became a widely perceived success whilst internationally other towers of modernity had fallen and the ruins crumbled. Malcolm Miles, as have many others, recalls, “after Ronan Point and Pruett-Igoe the modern project seems defunct.”20 Local differences therefore did not seem to affect these downfalls. Arguably, the backdrop of social unrest and upheaval facilitated the grounding of the social policy of this functionalist microcosm. Perhaps this is an unfortunate reason for its flourishing, after all it seemed to become something of an aspirational quantity to the people of Detroit, and with its origins as a low-cost affordable scheme it has attracted a wealth of professions and household incomes beyond its low threshold; “democratic leveling through
16 Roy Kozlovsky, Urban Play cited in Di Palma, Periton, Lathouri (eds.) Intimate Metropolis p213 17 Vasco Roma cited in Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar,,Natasha Chandani, (eds.) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit (Metropolis Books 2012) p45 18 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p20 19 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p19 20 Malcolm Miles, Salvaging Modernism cited in (Eds.) Miles, Malcolm, Savage, Janice, Nutopia – A Critical View of Future Cities (Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press 2012) p153 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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urban renewal – people of mixed incomes and ethnic groups would coexist.”21 Lafayette, the aforementioned suburb in the city, was realised through the concept of the unit. It was a designated block within the urban fabric that was to serve a given purpose. The death of developer Herbert Greenwald quelled the intention to repeat this unit. The residential function was composed across a number of courthouses, townhouses, the Lafayette towers and the Pavilion; all of these dispersed amongst a rich green park space. This pursuit was very much in line with the thought of Jose Luis Sert. He “advocated the Neighbourhood Unit as the building block of postwar urban renewal. A self-sufficient residential district surrounded by a green belt.”22 Lafayette evolved concurrently with the availability of the post World War II Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 for returning G.I.s that accelerated the relocation of white citizens to the outskirts of Detroit.23 Interestingly in this case, the implementation of the functionalist vision was not to be applied directly upon the physical ruins of war, more so the social ruins. In order to facilitate such plans, these ruins would have to be of artificial doing. The cultural strand that this in part unraveled, as referred to previously, helped to breed the 1967 riots that precipitated the exodus of the middle class to bordering areas of the city, whereby they could reside in social stability though still access the city for work. The Lafayette development was part of a wider program, the ‘Gratiot Redevelopment Project that was intended to “eliminate blight and enable Detroit to maintain its position as one of the nation’s great cities.”24 It was within a document published on completion of the project in 1964 that the overtly racist agenda came to full view; “The community [of Black Bottom,] had become occupied almost entirely by Negroes… [with] the absence of virtually every basic convenience necessary to health, comfort and safety.”25 It concluded that the Lafayette development should be seen as a ‘beacon of progress’ for the wider project; and it is apparent that this protection it is afforded has maintained its immunity to the wider social context fluctuating within its surroundings. It was coined the “nucleus of an expanding urban renewal program.”26 It is arguable that much of this protection was afforded due to the blessing of an exemplar in International Style modernism brought to Detroit by Van der Rohe. It would be the epitome of modernity for the people of the city, no greater antithesis to the vernacular slums that preceded it. The aesthetic and society it suggested seemed from afar, an imported identity of accomplishment. However it is because of this very quality that functionalism became criticised for “conceptualisation and production of an environment that denies differences 21 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p19 22 Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press 1997) p138 23 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p45 24 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p174 25 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p174 26 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p174 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
and local identities.”27 Geographical importance was apparently relegated for the sake of the architecture; this is in part the reason for the selection of case studies within this essay as a whole. The style, by which these case studies, Detroit, Plymouth and Brasilia employed architecture, relegates geographical significance. On the other hand however, Nicholas Bullock points out that in some cases the International Style did give way to a “series of regionally determined variants of modernism,”28 such as Oscar Niemeyer’s Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, 1936. There is an apparent sacrifice of façade for the implementation of louvers and solar allowance due to the climate.
NOW: Lafayette affords a particularly interesting perspective on the emergence of a successful society and consequent everyday life within a true utopian modernity. Central to this development is the probing of a psychology involving domestic modernity. Le Corbusier’s 1923 workers housing for the factories of Henry Fruges’ a Bordelais industrialist, offer a fascinating commentary on this theme. 29 Coerced in to the young architects’ modernist purity, the workers fast became disillusioned with a home that served only to remind them of the “dynamism of modern industry [,it] was not a pressing psychological priority” 30 given their employment within the industrial sector. They revolted, adorning their ‘plain’ abodes with antiquities and notions of a rural French idle. Alain De Botton remarks the actions on both parts served only to “evoke the qualities with which their own lives had become insufficiently endowed.”31 Consequently this precedent would serve to highlight an apposition between the social context within which the inhabitants operate, and the characteristics of the built environment within which they live. In the case of Lafayette, Detroit has always been a similarly industrialised environment. However the people that have consequently come to live in Lafayette, given the cities industrial diminution are no longer employed within what was the heartbeat of the city. Assuming this, it suggests a window into why Lafayette is apparently so comfortable to its inhabitants given their portrayal in Aubert’s, Cavar’s and Chandani’s Thanks for the View Mr. Mies’. Rem Koolhaas offers an antithesis to this relationship; “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything.”32 The inconsequentiality suggested between architecture and its occupants reveals that indeed in some cases within Lafayette, some residents do in fact enjoy living there without due acknowledgement of its ‘architecture’. When asked about Lafayette’s affect on their day-to-day life one resident 27 David Pinder, In Defence of Utopian Urbanism: cited in The dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia p233 28 Nicholas Bullock, Building The Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge 2002) p33 29 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness – The Secret of Furnishing your Life (London: Penguin 2007) p163 30 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness p164 31 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness p166 32 Vanessa Quirk, Rem Koolhaas: A Reluctant Architect (http://www.archdaily.com/294970/rem-koolhaas-areluctant-architect/) [Accessed 17/11/2012] BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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responds, “I’m sure it does. But I don’t spend much time wondering about it.”33 De Botton proposes that “architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them.”34 ‘Thanks for the View Mr. Mies’ appears to support this; photographic essays illustrate the choices of quotidian adornment within the interiors of the Lafayette homes. Daniel Miller’s similar portraits of a London street in ‘The Comfort of Things’ repeatedly fall upon this human desire to accumulate, suggesting that it is a purpose of life, not merely as an act of material possession but as an aspirational social theme that runs much deeper.35Alfred Gell indicates “consumption as the appropriation of objects as part of one’s personalia… [That we incorporate] consumer goods into the definition of the social self.”36 Consequently Lafayette illustrates that a disjuncture between the appropriation of interior spaces and the maintaining of International Style exterior qualities is achievable, but it encourages the question at what cost to everyday life given the reputation of modernism that can only ever aspire to this. Alain De Botton reminds us that “nature’s way is to corrode, melt, soften, stain and chew on the works of man.”37 Accordingly, Lafayette is now governed by a system of cooperatives that require residents to share and maintain collectively. These inevitably lead to conflicts as the strongest residents speak loudest.38 However it does allude to a “different political reality, one where people are more engaged.”39 It does then seem to have brought a renewal and transformation of society if only in the microcosm of its own extents. It appears to offer a system of a social utopia that works. Indeed it would seem to abide to Manheim’s ideology that a partial Utopia seen here on the scale of a single neighbourhood block, could provide a tangible vision for a utopia on a larger scale.
33 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p100 34 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness p20 35 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, (Cambridge: Polity Press 2008) 36 Alfred Gell, Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the Muria Gonds cited in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things – Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p112 37 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness p180 38 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p27 39 Aubert, Cavar, Chandani (eds) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies p27 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
Street: theAbercrombie plan, Plymouth THEN: “Now there are two ways of looking at this war. The first way… is to see this war as a terrible interruption. As soon as we can decently do it, we must return to peace… and go back to where we started from, the day before war was declared. This brings us to the second…that is to regard this war as a chapter in a tremendous history… There’s nothing that really worked that we can go back to. But we can go forward… and really plan and build a nobler world.”40 J.B. Priestley 1940 Plymouth was one of the worst hit cities in the UK during World War II given its naval and hence strategic importance. “In just seven nights of just one year [1941], the center’s of Plymouth and Devonport were laid to ruin.”41 The Plan for Plymouth by renowned town planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie, and city engineer James Paton Watson, was pre-emptively commissioned later that same year for the reconstruction of the formerly Medieval Plymouth city centre before the official end of WWII. This waiting game, coupled with the writing of the late thirties and early forties on architecture and town planning that was a “consistent diatribe against conditions in existing towns and cities”42 acted as a catalyst for this social utopia. As early as 1939, The New York Museum of Modern Art had devoted its spring exhibition to English modernism; hence it had ceased to be seen as an “architectural backwater.” 43 It in fact seemed partially a natural departure point for Abercrombie. Prior to the Plan for Plymouth that had been readied by 1943, “the city centre was built very densely with narrow streets hardly suitable for motor traffic.” 44 Abercrombie’s vision could be no more radical. The new plan was the direct antithesis of the “few open spaces” 45 that pre-existed. Hope and prosperity would seem to lie ahead. Gertrude Stains highlights the enigma that “those left at home [during the war] might have had the paradoxical experience of life continuing as ‘normal.’ ”46 Given that, the imminent social utopia would have appeared perhaps even more radical than to those returning home from service.
40 J.B. Priestley, Postscripts (London: Heinemann 1940) pp35-6 41 Brian Mosely, Plymouth Blitz: The March Raids (http://plymouthdata.info/Second%20World%20War-1941Blitz.htm) [Accessed 04/02/2013] 42 Gould, Jeremy, Gould, Caroline, The Architecture of the Plan for Plymouth 1943-1962 (Plymouth: 2000) p6 43 Nicholas Bullock, Building The Post-War World p28 44 Jeremy Gould, Caroline Gould, Plan for Plymouth p5 45 Jeremy Gould, Caroline Gould, Plan for Plymouth p5 46 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life p150 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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The plan that Abercrombie designed was strictly functional, given its delineation on the principle of different spaces for different occasions. Abercrombie’s training had been in the Beaux-Arts with its “emphasis on symmetry and on the axis as the generator of plan forms;”47 Plymouth offered the perfect opportunity for Abercrombie to exercise his tuition. The geographies of the city requested a grand processional route from the railway station at the north of the city centre, to the Hoe at the south. This space, Armada Way, was to provide the arterial axis of the new plan; all other elements were to be subservient to this. It was therefore not only a functionalist scheme that Abercrombie sought, but also one of impeccable symmetry that would serve to liberate the memory of war from the city’s people. This course of events had “sharpened the divide between present and past... revealing how extremely different modern existence was from pre-industrial life.” Nathaniel Coleman remarks how “bridging the two was now impossible... Modernity was triumphant.”48 In the name of modernity, the devastated city centre needed felling of remaining ruins and the agglomeration of the land upon which they resided. The city lobbied Parliament for the vital compulsory purchase powers enshrined in the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act.49 In doing so the state acquired the right to assume control. Jill Cragie’s 1946 portrayal of Plymouth’s postwar recovery in the film The Way We Live addresses this situation. “The shopkeepers visualised the town just as it was before, ‘that’s my corner, hands off,’ was their first reaction.”50 Abercrombie’s plan seemed neither a secret or proclaimed about; it was readied without sufficient circus to at first fully enlighten citizens such as these shopkeepers to the impending actions such as compulsory purchase. This subsequently raises the question whether a determinist approach is inevitable in achieving a social utopia that Team 10 recognised in their breakout from CIAM in the 1950’s. “CRITICS: What you must look for are PATTERNS OF REGENERATION. URBANISTS: You must create PATTERNS OF REGENERATION.”51 Roy Kozlovsky recognises the use of the child in the postwar project to mobilise this debate between prescribed and vernacular urbanism, seen in post and pre-war Plymouth respectively. Peter and Alison Smithson, amongst the founding figures of Team 10, suggest in their unrealised postwar project ‘Golden Lane’ a building that rises out of the rubble, “while the site plan designates these uncleared ruins as the estate’s playground.”52 The vitality of such an occasion is realised in Jill Cragie’s The Way We Live as children play amongst the physical ruins of the society; “a city of playgrounds.”53 Upon the implementation of Abercrombie’s 47 Jeremy Gould, Caroline Gould, Plan for Plymouth p9 48 Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture p96 49 MunicipalDreams, A Plan for Plymouth: ’Our First Great Welfare-State City’ (http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-plan-for-plymouth-our-first-great-welfare-state-city/) [Accessed 04/02/13] 50 Jill Cragie, The Way We Live (Two Cities Film 1946) [15:30] 51 ‘The Task of CIAM In the Fifties’, in Alison Smithson (ed.) The Emergence of Team Ten out of CIAM (London: Architectural Association 1982) p60 52 Roy Kozlovsky, Urban Play cited in Di Palma, Periton, Lathouri (eds.) Intimate Metropolis p205 53 Jill Cragie, The Way We Live (Two Cities Film 1946) [15:45] BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
plan, the standpoint of Jose Luis Sert once more becomes relevant. He chose to present children as “victims of urban chaos’, and street play as an aberration,”54 hence supporting the assignment of play to designated areas relieving the street to function as a means from which to get from A to B, rather than a place to live in.55 It is apparent that Abercrombie’s wider manifesto, if not as extreme, abides to this thinking; the street as a system in which activities that were perceived non-conducive to this were separated. The effects of the war were also to have a bearing on the city’s interpretation of the International Style. Contrasting to its employment at Lafayette whereby it did not undergo any localised interpretation, the buildings that were constructed within the plan for Plymouth tailored the International Style. Nicholas Bullock exposes the debate that as of 1943 modern architecture in the UK needed to meet “more than merely utilitarian needs in a functional manner,” there was an expectancy to mirror the cultural connotations of past monumental architecture.56 This allusion to monumentality became an issue however since it drew associations to the architecture of the Nazi regime. Consequently, the buildings of Plymouth city centre largely met a compromise of typically minimal decoration combined with a degree of mass that is enough to suggest a cultural expectation but did not imply monumentality as a metaphor of power. The regionally determined modernism suggested by Bullock appears to come to fruition here.
NOW: The observation of the new world that has emerged through Abercrombie and Watson’s plan aims to primarily dissect the emergence of an everyday life in the city’s streets. The wider society that has developed within the city is more heavily influenced by such issues as economic prosperity. One such parallel can be drawn to Rotterdam. It was another city devastated by World War II; it has since come to thrive as a commercial port however unlike Plymouth that maintains its status as a naval and defence facility. Crucially, Abercrombie’s design afforded no accommodation for residential life within the city centre; consequently daily life operates ordinarily between 9am and 5pm. The abandonment of the city streets is almost instantaneous with the ceasing of commercial activity for the day. Hence, the street system as proposed by Abercrombie becomes animated almost exclusively only during the day. Michel de Certeau proposes that “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.”57 Assuming this, Abercrombie’s plan, which is now nearly almost entirely pedestrianised, relies entirely on this footfall to be transformed into lifeworld; therein lays the deficiency of the plan to support life outside of the working day. Fundamental to this vital daytime operation is the central axis of Armada Way. 54 Roy Kozlovsky, Urban Play cited in Di Palma, Periton, Lathouri (eds.) Intimate Metropolis p196 55 Nicholas Fyfe (ed) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (London: Routledge 1998) p1 56 Nicholas Bullock, Building The Post-War World p49 57 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California: University of California Press 1984) p117 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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The intention of this processional way was to connect the train station at the north of the plan, to the Hoe at the south; it is only interrupted across the east-west axis a handful of times. De Certeau argues that such an action as to draw a line between points in plan is merely an act of representation that is indeed insufficient; “precisely because a trajectory is drawn… time and movement are thus reduced to a line.”58 It would seem this is highly relevant given that Armada Way came to dictate the functional divisions of the plan that in turn came to deny anything other than daytime activity from the city centre. Sporadic movement and evening hours became defunct. Lefebvre expands that “surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by.”59 It alludes to a gross simplification of everyday life. It has emerged that in the formation of a link between two geographically connected but distant points, (in the pedestrian scale,) the heterogeneity of everyday events that could occur along this route are overlooked. The pursuit of Armada Way would have animated Abercrombie’s architectural schooling of the perspective drawing; a method of representation that recalled the renaissance intention to portray “the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed.”60 Jan Gehl articulates this as a desire to address the “romantic languishing of the old cities.”61 For the pedestrian operating within Armada Way however this has its pragmatic deficiencies. Jan Gehl reflects on a play between physical and experienced distances.62 This is the psychological effect of the street as defined by geometry. Armada Way is an exemplar in illustrating this relationship; it maintains a constant trajectory for a distance approaching a mile. Gehl argues that “the same length can be experienced as a very short distance if the route is perceived in stages.”63 In addition to this, “alternating street spaces… will have the psychological effect of making the walking distances seem shorter.”64 A concept drawing for Abercrombie’s plan by … illustrates this idea. The quotidian operation as defined by the utopianism in Plymouth is defined by the projection of ordered spatial forms as a way to achieve social transformation. The justification for this social utopia out of conditions brought upon a city by means of war and devastation is entirely logical; a successful utopia would theoretically mobilise recovery. In application of Manheim’s theory, the scale of utopian vision witnessed in the case of Plymouth situates it more so as a partial utopia since it recognises it is a part of a whole city. It has an interest wider than simply itself.
58 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life p35 59 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life p97 60 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life p92 61 Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings - Using Public Space, (Kobvenhavn: Arkitektens Forlag, The Danish Architectural Press 2010) p45 62 Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings p137 63 Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings p137 64 Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings p141 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
City: Brasilia, Brazil THEN: “Brasilia was intended not to symbolise an existing national reality but rather to bring a new reality into being.”65 The agenda of this essay is to observe the conditions upon birth of proposed social utopias, as a means to dissect the transformation between the ruins of an old world and the new world that emerged in its place. President Juscelino Kubitschek was elected in 1955, he soon declared ‘fifty years of progress in five’; between the selection of site within the country’s vast unpopulated interior, awarding of the project to Lucio Costa, and inauguration of the new city in 1960, lay only 3 years. Interestingly there were no ruins upon which the new world must impose itself. Hence this would seem to expunge any relationship between the old and the new world, Brasilia did though offer an existing social commentary if not specific to its exact location. According to Manheim’s theory Brasilia is most definitely an absolutist utopia. Crucially it did not resist realisation however as Manheim proposes it should, which renders it cohesive to this discussion. In Cees Nooteboom’s essay Ex Nihilo, ‘from nothing’; he recalls a quip directed at his homeland that “God created the world and the Dutch created the Netherlands.”66 The recollection that the Netherlands are largely reclaimed from the sea provides an insightful parallel. The insinuation of a manufactured history is an interesting notion to attribute to Kubitschek’s pursuit. Nooteboom suggests that to the resident’s of Dutch towns reclaimed from the sea “it makes no difference that their hometown was created from nothing,” He proposes “the residents of… Brasilia must feel the same way.”67 Brasilia is not so much reclaimed in its physical sense though given the uninhabited wilderness that pre-existed it; it provided a tabula rasa. The reclamation of a social context is far more applicable. Hence, would it still feel the same way to the residents of Brasilia? Interestingly, writing in 1950 Oscar Niemeyer who designed Brasilia’s renowned centerpieces recognised “when such [technical and social] forces are not balanced, the resulting conflict is prejudicial to the content of the work.”68 Kenneth Frampton suggests this was recognition of working for an under-developed society. Indeed this is perhaps why Niemeyer declined Kubitschek’s invitation to design the entirety of Brasilia. Martino Stierli puts forward the idea that Kubitschek’s dream of the ideal city, akin to such historical paradigms such as Filarete’s Sforzinda, Savorgnano’s Palmanova or Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, became 65 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness p142 66 Cees Nooteboom, EX NIHILO: A Tale of Two Cities cited in Baan, Iwan, Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers 2010) p108-9 67 Nooteboom, EX NIHILO cited in Iwan Baan, Living with Modernity p110-11 68 Oscar Niemeyer cited in Kenneth Frampton, A Critical History of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd 1992) p256 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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justified on the grounds of the Brazil’s colonial past. He suggests Kubitschek sought “The dream of a national capital free of any symbolic associations with the Portuguese colonial regime.” 69 It is unclear whether this dream was belonging to the people or to the politics; it seems a valid suggestion that Brasilia followed a similar pattern as Canberra, Australia for example; the relocation of a capital city from a vibrant yet uncontrollable port city to a neutral interior both geographically and more importantly metaphorically. Michel de Certeau reveals the city as founded by utopian principles is defined by a threefold operation70. Primarily, the utopia is responsible for the production of its own space by means of a repressive rational organization; by the application of order and hierarchy upon its subjects the utopia hence assumes control of social, political and economical forces. Secondly, it must substitute the stubborn resistances of tradition for the mechanisation of a synchronic system; for example as Nicholas Fyfe suggests the street became a device “from which to get from A to B, rather than a place to live in’, displacing the street ‘from lifeworld to system’.”71 Finally, a successful utopia would achieve the replacement of haphazard social composition for a basis of stable, isolatable properties; this would manifest itself through determinist principles of design in pursuit of the city as very much a known entity. These criteria as proposed by de Certeau allude to the city as seen from a purely mechanical orientation, indeed Camillo Sitte bemoaned as early as 1898 that “nobody is concerned with city planning as an art – only as a technical problem.”72 Such a stance found fruition within the plan for Brasilia as an unrelenting desire for social hygiene73. Robert Hughes states Lucio Costa’s plano piloto enforced the notion that the population of the city would merely perform “one thing, at one time, in one specified place”74. In this sense Costa’s plano piloto, or master plan, was driven primarily as a form idea in the plan. Undoubtedly, like the renaissance ideals that preceded it, it was born upon a drawing board; Costa’s competition drawing skewed the orientation of the north arrow in sacrifice to this. The East-West axis of the plan accommodated government and administrative functions, whereas the curving North-South axis accommodated a succession of 280sqm residential superquadras. It was to be the epitome of the functionalist model. In this prescription of societal organisation it would seem to insinuate a creation of social relations. “Governors and ambassadors would live as neighbors with janitors and laborers,”75 encouraging the breeding of a radical social equality. Conversely Henri Lefebvre argues that it is only pos69 Martino Stierli, Brasilia: A Vision of Progress cited in Baan, Iwan, Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers 2010) p233 70 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life p94 71 Fyfe (ed) Images of the Street p1 72 Camillo Sitte, The Meager and Unimaginative Character of Modern City Planning Eds. Laurice, Michael, Macdonald, Elizabeth, The Urban Design Reader (Oxon: Routledge 2007) p36 73 Trouble in Utopia cited in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New – Art and the Century of Change (London: BBC Books 1991) p184 74 Trouble in Utopia cited in Hughes, The Shock of the New p184 75 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow p232 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
sible “under certain favourable conditions they help trends to be formulated,”76 and that it is not possible to simply construct from scratch in this fashion. Interestingly, Farès el-Dahdah recalls Costa’s acknowledgement of a quotidian scale in the plan for Brasilia; this is ironic considering the criticism for Brasilia in not affording this importance. Costa himself later coined this the scale “in which man acquires a collective dimension.”77
NOW: Everyday life as observed in Brasilia is thought provoking as Iwan Baan’s photographic essay of such matters illustrates. Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity illustrates a striking contradiction between the scale of utopian vision and that of the human figure. The photographic essay evokes the image of an architectural sketch, an idea and a vision that is devoid of reality. Only the people in these images are most definitely real, the moving trees are moved by the wind and the rain on the ground has fallen from the sky. In Farès el-Dahdah’s essay The Project of Brasilia, he portrays the city in this light; a vision that has never developed beyond the evolution of the project.78 He epitomises this through highlighting the location of Lucio Costa’s 50 foot-square model of the city in a gallery of its own, situated beneath the central square of the city. Of course such notions translate to the way in the state communicates itself to the population. For example, el-Dahdah recalls the road signage of the city that refers to Brasilia as plano piloto suggesting that, if only subconsciously, “one theoretically lives in a ‘project’ rather than a city.”79 This subsequently raises the question; who does now live in Brasilia? Are the superquadras successfully occupied by the egalitarian society that Costa proposed? Martino Stierli judges that Brasilia has failed to accommodate for the “traditional Brazilian ways of life as well as for the less affluent and the poor.”80 As a result of this satellite towns have emerged on the periphery of the plano piloto. This paradox that has arisen is somewhat ironic. Given the intention of the city to illustrate a new Brazilian society to the rest of the country, it has in turn spread the vernacular chaotic urban sprawl that it was to be the antithesis of, to the previously unspoiled interior of the country. It raises a debate regarding social utopianism; that the rigid planned core cannot exist without the spontaneous periphery, and vice versa. Lafayette abides to this given its status as an island of prosperity amongst a city of quite the opposite; Plymouth also facilitates this with the sprawl of suburbia surrounding the heavily planned centre. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City proposed a system of satellite towns; it is perhaps possible that a large-scale absolutist social utopia 76 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1996) p151 77 Farès el-Dahdah, The Project of Brasilia cited in Rodolphe El-Khoury, Edward Robbins, Shaping the City Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design (Abingdon: Routledge 2004) p50 78 Farès el-Dahdah, The Project of Brasilia cited in El-Khoury, Robbins, Shaping the City pp42-56 79 Farès el-Dahdah, The Project of Brasilia cited in El-Khoury, Robbins, Shaping the City p42 80 Stierli, A Vision of Progress cited in Baan, Living with Modernity p236 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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might be only generated through the holistic network of smaller scale partial utopias. To borrow the terminology of Jan Gehl; Brasilia did not seem to take into account the ‘life between buildings’. Refering to the functionalist project in general Gehl notes “it was not recognized that buildings also had a great influence on outdoor activities and consequently on a number of social activities.”81 The prescription of everyday life within strict superquadras negated the spontaneity of pedestrian encounters. There are no streets in which accidental contact is celebrated; wider movement is facilitated only by road. Cees Nooteboom recalls this from personal experience. “The scale was vast… My own, human proportions cowered at the violence of these dimensions.”82 As such, Peter Hall concludes, “society cannot be reduced to clockwork order.”83 According to Manheim’s utopian thinking Brasilia is an absolutist utopia, with the exception however that it did not resist realisation. It illustrates the consequences of urbanism based on the principle of a manufactured and in reality non-existent past. The old world did exist in its social incarnation, but whether it could qualify as a ruin is doubtful. This brief observation of the society that emerged reveals no real transformation in quotidian operation; it serves only to highlight the survival of a previous everyday life within a monument.
81 82 83
Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings p46 Nooteboom, EX NIHILO cited in Iwan Baan, Living with Modernity p113 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow p220
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Conclusion “A city is the accumulation of everything that has ever been said there.”84 Cees Nooteboom As a metaphor for social renewal, Nooteboom generates an intriguing dialectic. All that has ever been said in a city has of course been spoken by people that accordingly are the components of society. Through the implementation of a social utopia, it is as if new words are invented for a society that has yet to utter them. It is when these words do become spoken that a subsequent society, and hence quotidian operation comes in to being. By these means there is an intrinsic link between the ruins of the old world and the new. It is plausible that such utopian visions as discussed in this text then are simply successive incumbents of a social renewal. Who is to say that Lafayette does not lose its immunity to the surrounding instability, the city of Plymouth needs renewal once more, or the satellites that surround it are unknowingly consuming Lucio Costa’s Brasilia. Indeed this may be partially evidenced through Plymouth’s commissioning of the 2003 ‘Mackay Vision’. These studies are situated at the tipping point whereby the social utopianism of the era rested on the brink. They test the notion that the modernist project had lost its initial social drive. In reality, though the vitality of the movement may have diminished with familiarity, it does not seem possible to suggest that such utopian visions could ever exist without such social commentary. Hilde Heynen states “Modern architecture… did not bring utopia… it transformed itself from a social to a commercial enterprise.”85 It is in reality only a drop in the ocean but conversely Lafayette does provide precedent to such writings as Malcolm Miles’ Salvaging Modernism. With regards to the city of Plymouth, Gertrude Stains recalls the war brought an “emphasis on daily pleasures and the ordinary lives of people in extraordinary circumstances.”86 Radial though it was, Plymouth’s renewal was more than simply a vision for the postwar future, it attempted to be an eraser of the past too. Supposedly this is the antithesis of Brasilia; it needn’t erase the past, it was emphatically a projection of the future that sought to “create a totally new built form as a shell for a new society, without reference to history: the past was simply to be abolished.”87 It is worth noting however that it is for these reasons it has been thoroughly condemned, notably in Robert Hughes’ Trouble in Utopia. In response to Owen Hatherley’s proposition cited at the outset that ‘the new society might never have emerged’; whilst Lafayette motions an interesting portrait of a successful transformative utopia, Brasilia actually seems to portray a largely unchanged everyday life 84 Nooteboom, EX NIHILO cited in Iwan Baan, Living with Modernity p114 85 Hilde Heynen, Engaging Modernism cited in Henket, Hubert-Jan, Heynen, Hilde (eds.) Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2002) p392 86 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life p149 87 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow p232 BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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that is enduring peculiar surroundings. Importantly, Ben Highmore recalls Lefebvre’s and de Certeau’s refusal to “see the realm of the everyday as unproblematic.”88 Everyday life is that which deals with people that Jeremy Till suggests, “are more than abstractions or ideals; they are imperfect, multiple, [and] political.”89 It is significant to note that each of the case studies are merely fifty years old; a passage of time that is almost insignificant given the hundreds or thousands of years quotidian operation in many typically ‘great’ cities has evolved through. This period of time though can certainly be seen as character building and broadly defining of everyday life. As Ben Highmore orientates it; “the everyday is the name that cultural theory might give to a form of attention that attempts to animate the heterogeneity of social life.”90 It seems befitting to conclude this essay with a quote taken from Hubert-Jan Henket in a book titled Back From Utopia. This essay was intended not as a manifesto for redirection, but as a potentially suggestive insight of utopia and the everyday. Hence, Henket states; “we have become morally, spiritually and aesthetically fragmented… yet original reinterpretation… can lead to a new spirit, to a different modernity based on the realities of life.”91
88 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge 2001) 89 Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, (Cambridge (US): The MIT Press 2009) p 126 90 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life p188 91 Henket, Hubert-Jan, Heynen, Hilde (eds.) Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2002) p15
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alison, Jane, Brayer, Marie-Ange, Migayrou, Frédéric, Spiller, Neil (Eds.) Future City – Experiment and Utopia in Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd 2007) Appadurai, Arjun (Ed.), The Social Life of Things – Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Aubert, Danielle, Cavar, Lana, Chandani, Natasha (Eds.) Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit (Metropolis Books 2012) Baan, Iwan, Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers 2010) Bullock, Nicholas, Building The Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge 2002) Coleman, Nathaniel, Utopias and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge 2005) Collins, Peter, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1998) Conrads, Ulrich, Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press 1997). De Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness – The Secret of Furnishing your Life (London: Penguin 2007) de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, (California: University of California Press 1984). Di Palma, Vittoria, Periton, Diana, Lathouri, Marina (Eds.) Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Abingdon: Routledge 2009) El-Khoury, Rodolphe, Robbins, Edward, Shaping the City - Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design (Abingdon: Routledge 2004) Frampton, Kenneth, A Critical History of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd 1992) Frisby, David, Cityscapes of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press 2001) Fyfe, Nicholas (Ed.) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
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(London: Routledge 1998) Gehl, Jan, Life Between Buildings - Using Public Space, (Kobvenhavn: Arkitektens Forlag, The Danish Architectural Press 2010) Gordon, David (Ed.) Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities (Abingdon: Routledge 2010) Gould, Jeremy, Gould, Caroline, The Architecture of the Plan for Plymouth 1943-1962 (Plymouth: 2000) Hall, Peter, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2002) Henket, Hubert-Jan, Heynen, Hilde (Eds.) Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2002) Highmore, Ben (Ed.) The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge 2002) Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New – Art and the Century of Change (London: BBC Books 1991) Johnson-Marshall, Percy, Rebuilding Cities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1966) Laurice, Michael, Macdonald, Elizabeth (Eds.) The Urban Design Reader (Oxon: Routledge 2007) Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Transaction Books 1984) Lefebvre, Henri, Writings on Cities, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1996) Miles, Malcolm, Savage, Janice (Eds.) Nutopia – A Critical View of Future Cities (Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press 2012) Miller, Daniel, The Comfort of Things, (Cambridge: Polity Press 2008) More, Sir Thomas, Utopia (Longman 2004) Priestley, J.B, Postscripts (London: Heinemann 1940) Randall, Bryony, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007) Smithson, Alison (Ed.) The Emergence of Team Ten out of CIAM (London: Architectural Association 1982) BUILDING A NEW WORLD ON THE RUINS OF THE OLD: JOSEPH COPP
Till, Jeremy, Architecture Depends, (Cambridge (US): The MIT Press 2009)
FILM Cragie, Jill, The Way We Live (Two Cities Film 1946) Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New - Trouble in Utopia (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pnYUJyjTieU)
WEBSITES Mosley, Brian, ‘A Plan for Plymouth’ , (http://plymouthdata.info/Plan%20for%20Plymouth. htm)
JOURNALS Koolhaas, Rem, Junkspace in October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence. (Spring, 2002), pp. 175190 Pinder, David, In Defence of Utopian Urbanism: Imagining Cities after the ‘End of Utopia’ in Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 84 No. ¾, Special IssueL The dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia (Sweden: Wiley 2002)
ARTICLES Quirk, Vanessa, Rem Koolhaas: A Reluctant Architect (http://www.archdaily.com/294970/ rem-koolhaas-a-reluctant-architect/) MunicipalDreams, A Plan for Plymouth: ’Our First Great Welfare-State City’ (http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-plan-for-plymouth-our-first-great-welfare-state-city/)
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